How to start a successful online business?

Whether you are a freelance photographer, own a hardware store, or have another type of small business, a good website is essential to the success of your business online. The most compelling reason to go online right now is to reach your customers from their couches. Plus, you can take orders 24 hours a day rather than being limited to business hours.

For this, I decided to devote this other article to Finance de Demain to show you step by step how to successfully create an online business. Everyone, from the beginner to the seasoned online entrepreneur, can benefit from this process of learning how to start an online business.

There are several steps to get a business online. In this article, I present to you 12 of them. But before, if you want to earn money with 1XBET without investing, click here to create your account and benefit from 50 FCFA to start. Promo code: argent2035.

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🥀 Step 1. Register a domain name

The first step in starting an online business is choosing a domain name. Your domain name, also known as your website address, is often the entry point to your site. It is important that it makes a good impression for usability purposes, as well as site referencing (SEO).

Choose a name for your website that is easy to remember, recognize and pass on to friends. Be concise. Make sure it's easy to spell. And include terms that customers are likely to search for on the internet like “ finance de demain ". When choosing your domain name, also think about your industry, your services, etc.

As a concrete example, this site tells you about finance in general and its domain name is financeddemain.com.

Once you have chosen a domain name that you like and that works well, buy it. A quick Google search will show you a variety of sites where you can rent domain names.

🥀 Step 2. Buy Secure Website Hosting

The second thing you need to do to successfully launch your online business is to host the website. In fact, a website host is a company that offers the technology and services needed to view a website on the Internet.

You connect with your domain name to your hosting provider so that when users visit your website address, they see your website which you store on your hosting account.

🥀 Step 3: Design and build site of your business online

After hosting your site, The third thing to do is design your site. To make your online business successful, your site must reflect the type of service you offer. You know your budget and your resources.

Now is the time to put everything together to create your online store. It is possible to outsource much of this work provided you have a solid plan and direction.

You can keep a lot of the creation in-house if you work with an existing platform or have the design experience.

Once you have your market and your product, and you have defined your sales process, you are now ready for your small business web design. Remember to keep it simple.

You have less than five seconds to get someone's attention – otherwise, they're gone, never to be seen again. Some important tips to keep in mind:

Choose one or two simple fonts on a white background.
Make your navigation clear and simple, and the same on every page.
Only use graphics, audio or video if they enhance your message.
Include an opt-in offer so you can collect email addresses
Make the purchase easier – no more than two clicks from potential customer to payment.
Your website is your online storefront, so make it user-friendly.

🥀 Step 4: Use a good content management system

The success of an online business also depends on choosing a good content manager, Content Management System. A content management system (CMS) is software used to create and manage digital content. A good CMS will help you maintain your site, and you don't need a lot of technical knowledge to use it.

You should choose a CMS designed for your unique needs; Different systems are used for different reasons, such as usability, scalability, and budget. Here are some popular CMS to build your online business.

WordPress

WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. It has a huge active support community and lots of useful plugins to extend your site's functionality. WordPress is also free and relatively easy to install.

Most web developers are familiar with it, so finding someone or an agency that can work on your site isn't difficult. I normally recommend small businesses to use WordPress to build their websites, due to its flexibility and extensibility.

It should be noted, however, that WordPress's biggest weakness is security. Because he is so popular, hackers target it the most. Your WordPress site must be regularly maintained and secured so as not to be hacked.

Also, it is difficult to secure all third-party plugins, so securing your WordPress site should be an ongoing commitment through various best practices.

Check if your plugins have been updated in the last few months. Make sure it is a plugin provided in the official WordPress repository. Immediately remove unused plugins, etc.

Drupal

Drupal is another popular CMS. It offers many of the same benefits as WordPress, including flexibility, ease of use, and a large support community. These include a more secure CMS than WordPress (safer from malicious activities).

However, it doesn't have as many plugin or theme options, making it less extensible. For many years, the White House website was run with Drupal, but it has since moved to WordPress, which it still uses today.

Joomla!

Another popular CMS is Joomla ! Out of the box, it has better SEO, security, and multilingualism capabilities than WordPress. However, with the help of a few plugins, WordPress surpasses the capabilities of Joomla!

Squarespace

Squarespace is a service you subscribe to monthly or annually that makes building websites and blogs an easy experience. drag and drop ».

It is particularly suitable for creatives and provides you with top-notch design templates. If you're on a tight budget, need a simple and beautiful site, but can't afford a website designer, this is a great service for you.

There's a much smaller learning curve with Squarespace than with WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. But it doesn't have as many extensibility options. However, if you have little to no technical knowledge and are looking for a quick and easy way to build a website, Squarespace is a great option for you.

Wix

Wix is very similar to Squarespace, but a bit more user-friendly. It offers a monthly, but not annual, subscription and includes similar features. Wix is also a drag and drop builder.

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You can freely drag and drop elements anywhere on the page; in comparison, Squarespace is more structured where you can drag and drop onto the page. The learning curve for using Wix is even shorter than Squarespace, so if you need to publish a site quickly, this may be your best bet.

Wix offers many more templates than Squarespace. Once you choose a template, you have to stick with it or be forced to completely rebuild your site. With Squarespace, you can change your template at any time without having to rebuild the entire site.

🥀 Step 5: Choose a good e-commerce platform for your online business

If you plan to sell goods and/or services through your website, you'll need the right technology to do so. If you decide to allow users to conduct financial transactions with you online, you will need to choose the right platform for your business model.

Here are some popular e-commerce platforms for small businesses

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world. It can transform your WordPress website into Online Store. Like WordPress, there are many plugins available, and it attaches to WordPress, making it extremely flexible.

There are many pre-built free and premium themes for WooCommerce. Generally, it's best to use a premium theme from a reputable developer, as it will provide better security and support.

If you're not tech-savvy, you'll probably need a WordPress developer to help you set it up and use it. WooCommerce also offers a huge amount of capabilities and scalability that your small business might need.

Shopify

Shopify is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that lets you create and customize an online store, and manage products, inventory, payments, and shipping. This is not an extension WordPress like WooCommerce – it is a standalone platform that is hosted on Shopify server.

So if you have a main website, your e-commerce site would be technically separate from it. You can link to your Shopify account from your regular website created with WordPress, Drupal, Wix, etc. Unless your main website has a Shopify integration plugin.

Features include unlimited products, unlimited bandwidth, fraud analysis, discount codes, reports and more. The main advantages of Shopify are that you don't need a developer to set up a store and everything on the backend is already set up for you when you sign up.

The downside is that you don't have as much control or flexibility over your store as you would with WooCommerce.

ShopifyPlus

Shopify Plus is Shopify. It has a higher level of customization, more staff accounts, and international e-commerce options. It also has a higher level of support.

However, all of this obviously comes with a higher subscription cost, and it still doesn't have all of WooCommerce's flexibility and customization capabilities.

Business Squarespace

Squarespace offers an e-commerce subscription option. If you chose Squarespace to build your site, you can use it to do business. Business Squarespace charges transaction fees. This can be circumvented by upgrading your subscription to a basic online store.

It includes a free domain, SSL security, SEO, abandoned cart recovery, discounts, real-time carrier shipping, and more. However, it has been noted that it is not as user-friendly as Shopify. And like Shopify, it's just not as flexible as WooCommerce.

Wix

Wix actually has a Shopify extension which is very user-friendly. You will need to update your Wix account and subscribe to Shopify in order to use it.

🥀 Step 6: Bet on the referencing of your online business

Once your store is created, it's time to display it in the TOP 10 Google searches. This is SEO, Search Engine Optimization (English version). Search engine optimization (SEO) is the reason why some websites rank higher than others in search engine results.

Learning how SEO works and how to hone your own SEO practices will be key to getting found when people search for the services or products you offer.

SEO mainly includes the following practices:

Keyword research and implementation
Optimal website code
Fast loading speed
Be safe and have a SSL certificate installed; SSL is the standard security technology that ensures that data transmitted between web servers and browsers remains private
Have a mobile-friendly site
Existence of high quality backlinks (links on external websites with related content) leading to your site
Having lots of positive reviews online (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.)
Use internal links throughout your site to keep people clicking and reading
Use social networks to create a link to your site (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)

Don't underestimate the impact of improving your website's SEO and ranking positions! SEO is an extremely important ongoing process that can mean the difference between appearing on the first page of search engine results pages.

🥀 Step 7 : Get involved on social media

In the fourth quarter of 2019, Facebook reported nearly 2,5 billion monthly active users. With the other platforms under Facebook (WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger), nearly the number of users climbs to 2,9 billion.

Admittedly, your local business will only target a very small portion of these users. But the thing is, the users you will end up targeting are a waiting audience. The first thing to do is familiarize yourself with how social media marketing works. Once that's done, you'll be well on your way to attracting more business through social media.

If you already have a loyal following on social media, you have a head start. We will focus on three of the major websites as selling platforms.

Facebook

As we've seen, Facebook is brilliant at identifying potential customers in a very targeted way. And you can add a "buy now" button to your Facebook ad. However, the social media giant is happy to swallow your money no matter how many sales conversions you make.

First, you need to create a Facebook page for your business in addition to your personal Facebook account. This page will only be seen by people who have "liked" your page.

In fact, they allow you to advertise them. After an ad has been running for a few days, you'll see a "relevance" score to calculate if your ad is engaging its target audience.

There are four types of Facebook ads:

Sponsored which appears in a box to the right of your Facebook News Feed.
Page posts that appear in people's newsfeeds.
Sponsored Stories that are sent to your News Feed if a Facebook friend has already engaged with the brand
Sponsored posts which are regular newsfeed posts that have been enhanced to increase reach.

Instagram

Showing a customer a photo of your product and having them tap to buy it instantly is a compelling sales platform. You can go from inspiration to purchase in just a few clicks.

When you see a shopping cart on an Instagram post, it means you can shop by swiping your finger over the item. Items are marked with price tags.

Also, you can add hashtags to photos to help Instagrammers find your products. Here is an example of tags:

#Financeoftomorrow
#FinanceAdvisor of tomorrow
#hi-tops #basketball.

As a service, Buyable Instagram is free although you need to connect it to your Facebook business page and create a catalog. And while your catalog isn't connected directly to your website, you can link the two — and your inventory — through a third-party e-commerce platform like Shopify.

As with other social media platforms, don't post boring white background product photos on Instagram – you need to create interesting and engaging images. You don't want your Instagram feed to be one continuous sales catalog.

For a business, optimizing Pinterest for SEO can meet different objectives. Pinterest allows businesses to show off their products and make themselves known. Social media is a golden opportunity to capture the attention of consumers and increase the notoriety of a company.

Pinterest allows you to create backlinks from quality at lower cost. Backlinks help attract Internet users to a website, and therefore generate traffic.

Pinterest also helps to develop conversions and boost sales. A Pin on Pinterest acts as a CTA (Call To Action) and directs users to the company's website. Once users visit the company's website, they can request a quote or make a purchase.

Some themes are very popular on Pinterest. Among them, do-it-yourself, gardening, decoration, fashion… These are subjects for which users are looking for advice, ideas, and sometimes even service providers! Pinterest helps consumers discover new products and indirectly influences their buying decision.

🥀 Step 8: Optimize your online business for mobile devices

Did you know that nearly 75% of all visits to all websites in 2020 were made with a smartphone? That was a year ago and the number continues to rise.

If your online business website is difficult to use when accessed through a smartphone, you can say goodbye to those customers. One of the characteristics of smartphone users is that they usually don't have a lot of patience! People want pages to load quickly and easily, and to be easy to use and navigate.

Make sure your site does all of this by optimizing it for customers who visit via mobile phones. If you created your site and store with WordPress, the AMP plugin will allow you to adapt your site to mobile phones.

You can take a walk in the shop of Finance de Demain to see what she looks like. This shop is designed from the Woo commerce extension on WordPress.

🥀Step 9: Develop an online business marketing plan

After creating and optimizing your website and online business, you now need to attract customers to it. Although SEO has many long-term benefits, it does not guarantee future success and certainly cannot be counted on for immediate sales.

Your marketing plan will of course be related to your product or service. But there are many ways to reach your target market online.

Will you pay for ads on other sites?
Are you creating native ads like videos and articles?
Self-promotion through online communities?

Develop a marketing plan that fits your goals, budget and time. Marketing will be the most labor and cost sensitive aspect of your emerging business.

🥀Step 10: Create a customer base for your online business

Your first sale is exciting. So it is with the second. But what's even more exciting is when customers come back and buy more from you in the future. This means you're going to need a way to contact them about new deals and promotions.

Build a customer base by offering free promotions, getting customers to sign up for a newsletter, collecting emails for a special message or birthday greeting. They're not just your customers for the day – they're your customers for business life.

🥀Step 11: Become active in your community

To to sell products from your brick-and-mortar business, you try to get out and be active in your brick-and-mortar community. The same is true in the online world. If anything, networking is even more important online. Build relationships with upstream and downstream companies.

Join communities in your industry. Get to know what other people are doing and what they're not doing – you might discover a profitable niche that no one is covering. You won't know until you go look.

🥀 Step 12: Reorganize and reinvent your online business if necessary

Finally, no online business succeeds in the same way for eternity. And the online attention span is even shorter than the physical one. Keep a close eye on your stats. Work hard to stay ahead of the game and be immediately responsive to changes in the online environment.

A well-developed brand can bring in new products and archive old ones. Build a business around what you do and how you do it and you can scale quickly as the market fluctuates around you.

🥀 In short...

If you want your e-commerce business to thrive, you'll need more than a great name and a catchy product. A sustainable business model involves careful planning, careful design and – perhaps most critical of all – careful and continuous development.